explanation of the universality of this phenomenon we have no further need to occupy ourselves with the general psychology of imitation. We have here only to take notice of its importance for the communication of feeling. As is well known, it is only in cases of abnormally increased sensibility—for instance, in some of the stages of hypnotism and thought transmission—that the motor counterpart of a mental state can be imitated with such faithfulness and completeness that the imitator is thereby enabled to partake of all the _intellectual_ elements of the state existing in another. The hedonic qualities, on the other hand, which are physiologically conditioned by much simpler motor counterparts, may of course be transmitted with far greater perfection: it is easier to suggest a pleasure than a thought. It is also evident that it is the most general hedonic and volitional elements which have been considered by the German authors on æsthetic in their theories on internal imitation (“Die innere Nachahmung”). They seem to have thought that the adoption of the attitudes and the performance of the movements which usually accompany a given emotional state will also succeed to some extent in producing a similar emotional state. This assumption is perfectly legitimate, even if the connection between feeling and movement be interpreted in the associative way. And it needs no justification when the motor changes are considered as the physiological correlate of the feeling itself. Everyday experience affords many examples of the way in which feelings are called into existence by the imitation of their expressive movements. A child repeats the smiles and the laughter of its parents, and can thus partake of their joy long before it is able to understand its cause.[114] Adult life naturally does not give us many opportunities of observing this pure form of direct and almost automatic transmission. But even in adult life we may often meet with an exchange of feeling which seems almost independent of any intellectual communication. Lovers know it, and intimate friends like the brothers Goncourt,[115] to say nothing of people who stand in so close a rapport with each other as a hypnotiser and his subject.[116] And even where there is no previous sympathetic relation, a state of joy or sadness may often, if it is only distinctly expressed, pass over, so to say, from the individual who has been under the influence of its objective cause, to another who, as it were, borrows the feeling, but remains unconscious of its cause. We experience this phenomenon almost daily in the influence exerted upon us by social intercourse, and even by those aspects of nature—for instance, blue open sky or overhanging mountains—which naturally call up in us the physical manifestation of emotional states. The coercive force with which our surroundings—animate or inanimate—compel us to adopt the feelings which are suggested by their attitudes, forms, or movements,